“I don’t think the courses have necessarily become more ‘Warmblood-friendly’ so much as that we are seeing better-suited Warmbloods.”
course design is making a swing from overly technical back to being more inviting for horses and riders. “Courses have become more horse friendly by having
fewer fences for the distance,” he says. “This has made it easier for more types of horses to make the time,” he says. Eric thinks that technical fences like narrows, corners
and triple brushes are here to stay but explains that course designers are giving riders more breathing room by spacing the technical questions out, with more galloping fences between them. “Courses are actually becoming less technical in that
designers are smoothing out the ground they are putting fences on. Mounds have more space on the top, you spend less time on the off camber (where the land is sloping away as you gallop across it) and undulating terrain is smoothed out. Every year I do more dirt work on cross-country courses, and less of it is to create new things and more is to smooth out the ground.”
dimension to the fences without punishing the horses for mistakes.” Denis Glaccum explains how course designers use brush
to make jumps bigger. “Because of what horses have to do in stadium today they are much scopier as a group, with advanced horses jumping 4’3” in the arena, so on cross- country you can make a much bigger jump with the brush. Then when you have these corners and accuracy questions you can tailor the jumps to ask exactly what you want.” He warns that the downside of using a lot of brush in
jump construction is that horses get away with making mistakes with brush that would get them in trouble with a totally solid fence, so he encourages course designers not to go overboard with brush.
Trends and New Demands Denis classifies every type of jump on a course: from a
galloping jump to an accuracy jump, a bravery jump and so on. “You find less of the real bravery type of jumps today, where a horse is asked to jump blindly into or out of something,” he says. “Riders have to be really, really accurate with jumps now, but I don’t necessarily think that this trend
Eric also says that the general shape of fences has been much the same for the last ten years at the top of the sport but that over time these shapes have trickled down through the levels. “Now at the top of the sport you are seeing more open oxers and some fences built with smaller materials—instead of massive logs, for instance—giving fences a more airy look.” He explains that this can now be done safely with frangible pin technology, which allows the jump to collapse in order to help prevent rotational falls. Lauren Bliss Kieffer thinks that the technical changes
have been good overall as long as the questions are “readable” and the jumps are safe for the horses. “I would like to see the continued use of brush to make the fences big, bold and impressive,” she says. “It adds another
Jumping the table at The Fork in 2011 is Jan Byyny and Why Not.
in course design—with more corners and skinny fences—is strictly a result of more Warmblood horses competing in eventing.” All this “tricky stuff” has changed not only the type of
horse that eventers ride but also how they train their horses. “The predominance of accuracy fences on cross-country encourages more specific training at home and an agile
Warmbloods Today 17
Josh Walker
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